Stimulus working? Well, yeah. How? Uhh ...

Posted: Sunday, February 21, 2010

By BLAKE AUED

More than $100 million has poured into the Athens-area economy since President Obama signed his federal economic stimulus package into law a year ago.

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act created or saved up to 2.4 million jobs nationwide, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, and more than 40,000 in Georgia, according to the state Office of Stimulus Accountability.

But those figures are really just guesses. No one knows exactly how many more jobs would have been lost during the worst downturn since the Great Depression if not for the stimulus, especially at the local level.

"There's no way to know," said U.S. Rep. Paul Broun, R-Athens. "You could get any kind of number you could possibly pull out of the air."

Stimulus recipients report how many jobs they create or save based on a federal formula. In Oconee County, for example, the school district received a $1.7 million grant last year to plug a budget gap created by falling tax revenue. The district divided the amount of the grant by teachers' $55,000 average salary to come up with 31 teaching jobs saved, Assistant Superintendent for Finance Randy Morrison said.

Other grants for preschool and disabled students created one teaching job and three paraprofessional positions in Oconee County, he said.

If Oconee County had not gotten federal help to pay teachers - other school districts received similar grants - the district might have laid off 31 teachers, or it might have furloughed teachers or cut other costs to save the same amount of money, Morrison said.

"The alternative would have been to somehow reduce expenses by an equivalent number," he said.

An ocean of data on state and federal stimulus-tracking Web sites provides detailed information about who got how much money and what it's used for. But tracking job reports is nearly impossible on the city or county level.

Groups that get stimulus grants directly from the federal government report the jobs they created or saved to the feds. Groups that are in line for a share of Georgia's $6.2 billion in stimulus funds report to the state agencies that distribute the money. Those agencies aggregate the recipients' reports and send them to Washington. The jobs figures are not broken down geographically within the state, said Sid Johnson, Gov. Sonny Perdue's stimulus czar.

Finding the number of jobs stimulus funding created or saved in Athens "is going to be really tough to get," Johnson said. "We can't get it."

Barrow, Jackson, Clarke, Madison, Oglethorpe and Oconee counties received a combined 204 stimulus grants totaling $148 million, according to the federal stimulus Web site Recovery.gov. About three-quarters flowed to Athens, the largest city in the region and home to the University of Georgia.

Those grants created only 163 jobs, according to Recovery.gov. If that number seems too small to be true, that's because it is.

Hard to count

The Recovery.gov job figures do not include tens of millions of dollars given to the University of Georgia to offset lost tax revenue, which saved 217 jobs, according to the University System Board of Regents. Nor does it include research grants won by individual UGA professors, $2.6 million for the Athens Housing Authority to renovate public housing units, $15 million given to the Athens-Clarke government for water and sewer lines, energy efficiency, social services and new buses, multi-million-dollar grants that pay employees' salaries at local school districts or a host of other grants.

ACTION Inc., an Athens-based nonprofit that provides social services for a 12-county area, is using $7 million in stimulus funds to provide grants and training to nonprofit administrators and entrepreneurs, to winterproof houses, to plant community gardens and for other programs.

"We have created, we know, 18 jobs, and that doesn't include weatherization" said Gwen O'Looney, who oversees ACTION's stimulus programs. "It's given really valuable work to a bunch of contractors who went out and got special training to weatherize houses for low-income people."

Athens-Clarke Assistant Manager Richard White, in charge of tracking the county government's stimulus grants, said he is working on a system that will allow county officials to see how many jobs are being created or saved locally.

"The way it's being reported, the database, it's hard to figure out," White said.

ARRA did help

Despite the lack of hard, local job numbers, most economists agree that the stimulus spending is helping the economy recover, although opinions differ on how much.

The ARRA was well-timed and the proper size, but it would have packed more of a punch if it focused less on advancing the Obama Administration's policy goals, UGA economist Jeff Humphreys said.

"It could have been designed for a higher impact than it had, but it did have a positive impact," Humphreys said.

Broun, who opposed the stimulus and introduced a bill last year to give the unspent money directly to taxpayers, said the ARRA has done some good in some circumstances, such as saving government jobs, but hasn't lived up to its billing.

"(Obama) promised us that if we passed the stimulus, unemployment would stay below 8 percent," Broun said. "He lied. Eight percent would be great today."

The recession is technically over and the economy growing again, but unemployment is lagging behind and only beginning to drop below double digits. The national unemployment rate was 9.7 percent in January, down from 10 percent the previous month. Unemployment was 10.3 percent in Georgia and 7.2 percent in Athens in December, the most recent statistics available.

Transparency worked

Obama also touted the ARRA as a way to rebuild the nation's crumbling infrastructure, but Georgia and Athens have missed out on much of the law's transportation funding. Not only was Georgia passed over for billions of dollars for high-speed rail, but only three minor stimulus-funded road repaving projects are on the books in Clarke, Oconee and Madison counties, said Sherry Moore, a planner for the regional transportation board MACORTS.

Stimulus-funded transportation projects merely are supplanting other work the state Department of Transportation would be doing otherwise, Moore said.

"The wheels at GDOT have just ground to a halt," she said. "They're not doing anything else."

Another aspect of the ARRA Obama emphasized - transparency - has resulted in few reports of corruption. State officials investigated only two reports of waste, fraud or abuse on stimulus projects, state Inspector General Liz Archer said, although reports could rise as more money flows into the state.

"We anticipated a delayed response once the money started going out," Archer said. "We did not expect to see it so much in the beginning."

Only a third of the ARRA's $787 billion in tax cuts, entitlement funding and funding for capital projects has been spent so far.